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Rh 1810.] NAPOLEON 215 Dornberg, Katt, Brunswick, anxiously expected. There seems little doubt that, if this armament had made Germany its object, Germany would at once have sprung to arms and have attempted, perhaps prematurely, what in 1813 it accomplished. What was expected in Germany had happened already in the Peninsula. Arthur Wellesley had landed at Lisbon on April 22d, and in less than a month had driven Soult in confusion out of Portugal. In July he undertook an invasion of Spain by the valley of the Tagus. Thus both the quantity and quality of resistance to Napoleon was greater than at any former time ; but it was scattered, and the question was whether it could concentrate itself. But England was unfortunate this time in her interven tion. The armament did not set sail till August, when in Austria the war seemed to be at an end, and when Wellesley, after winning the battle of Talavera, had seen himself obliged to retire into Portugal, and it was directed not to Germany but against Antwerp. It was therefore a mere diversion, and as such it proved unsuccessful. It created indeed a great flutter of alarm in the administration at Paris, which saw France itself left unprotected while its armies occupied Vienna and Madrid, but by mismanage ment and misfortune the great enterprise failed, and accomplished nothing but the capture of Flushing. Treaty of And so the last triumph of Napoleon was achieved, and Schon- the treaty of Schonbrunn was signed on October 20th. brunn. By this treaty, as by former treaties, he did not merely end a war or annex territory, but developed his empire and gave it a new character. He now brought to an end the duumvirate which had been established at Tilsit. Since Tilsit his greatness had been dependent on the concert of Eussia. He had had the czar s permission to seize Spain, the czar s co-operation in humbling Austria. Schonbrunn made his empire self-dependent and self-sup porting, and thus in a manner completed the edifice. But War he could not thus discard Russia without making her an with enemy, and accordingly the Russian war appears on the Russia horizon a t the very moment that the Austrian war is terminated. This transformation was accomplished by first humbling Austria, and then, as it were, adopting her and giving her a favoured place in the European con federacy. She lost population to the amount of 3,500,000, besides her access to the sea ; she paid an indemnity of more than 3,000,000, and engaged to reduce her army to 150,000. But, thus humbled, a high and unique honour was reserved for her. We cannot be quite certain whether it was part of Napoleon s original plan to claim the hand of an archduchess, though this seems likely, since Napoleon would hardly break with Russia unless he felt secure of the alliance of Austria, and yet in the treaty of Schonbrunn he does not hesitate to offend Russia by rais ing the Polish question. What is certain is that after his return to France Napoleon proceeded at once to the divorce, that at the same time he asked the czar for the hand of his sister, that upon this Austria, alarmed, and seeing her own doom in the Russian match, gave him to understand (as he may very well have calculated that she would do) that he might have an archduchess, and that upon this he extricated himself from his engagement to the czar with a rudeness which might seem intended to make him an enemy. At the same time he refused to enter into an engagement not to raise the Polish question. Divorce At an earlier period we saw Napoleon urged by his of Jose- brothers to divorce Josephine, but refusing steadfastly and phine. apparently resolved upon adopting the eldest son of Louis and Hortense. He had now quite ceased to be influenced by his brothers, but at the same time he had risen to such greatness that he had himself come to think differently of the question. Fourteen years before he had been warmly attached to Josephine ; this attachment bad been an effective feature in the character of republican hero which he then sustained. Mme. de Stael had been profoundly struck, when, on being charged by her with not liking women, he had answered, &quot;J aime la mienne.&quot; &quot;It was such an answer,&quot; she said, &quot; as Epaminondas would have given ! &quot; He is now equally striking in the part of an Oriental sultan, and when he discards his Josephine for ambition he requires to be publicly flattered for his self-sacrifice by the officials, by Josephine herself, and even by her son Eugene Beauharnais ! The archduchess Marie Louise, who now ventured to Marriage take the seat of Marie Antoinette, seems to have been of with amiable but quite insignificant character. Her letters are Mar. ie childlike. She became a complete Frenchwoman, but, owing to a certain reserve of manner, was never specially popular. On March 20, 1811, she bore a son, who took the title of King of Rome, by which in the Holy Roman Empire the successor had been designated. France had thus become once more as monarchical as in the proudest days of Versailles ; but the child of empire was reserved for what his father called &quot;the saddest of fates, the fate of As- tyanax.&quot; Arrived now at the pinnacle, Napoleon pauses, as he had paused after Marengo. We are disposed to ask, What use will he now make of his boundless power ? It was a question he never considered, because the object he had set before himself in 1803 was not yet attained; he was not in the least satiated, because, much as he had gained, he had not gained what he sought, that is, the humiliation of England. As after Tilsit, so after Schonbrunn, he only asks, How may the new resources be best directed against England 1 ? Yet he did not, as we might expect, devote himself to crushing the resistance of the Peninsula. This he seems to have regarded with a mixed feeling of con tempt and despair, not knowing how to overcome it, and persuading himself that it was not worth a serious effort. He persisted in saying that the only serious element in the Spanish opposition was the English army ; this would fall with England herself ; and England, he thought, was on the point of yielding to the blockade of the Continental system. He devotes himself henceforth therefore to heightening the rigour of this blockade. From the beginning it had led to continual annexations, because only Napoleon s own admin istration could be trusted to carry it into effect. Accord ingly the two years 1810-11 witness a series of annexations chiefly on the northern sea-coast of Europe, where it was important to make the blockade more efficient. But on this northern sea-coast lay the chief interests of Russia. As therefore in 1805 he had brought Austria and Russia on himself by attacking England, so in 1810 he presses his hostility to England to the point that it breaks the alliance of Tilsit and leads to a Russian war. The year 1810 is occupied with this heightening of the Continental system and the annexations which it involved. That he had long contemplated the annexation of Holland Annexa- appears from the offer of the crown of Spain which he lion of made to Louis in 1808, and the language he then used (&quot;La H llai Hollande ne saura sortir de ses ruines&quot;). He now took Vest- ad vantage of the resistance which Louis made to his ruin- phalia. ous exactions. Louis was driven to abdicate, and the country was organized in nine French departments. In August the troops of the king of Westphalia were forced to make way for French troops at the mouths of the Elbe and Weser, and a few months later the whole coast between the Rhine and the Elbe was annexed. At the same time Napoleon began to make war on neutral commerce, especially American, affirming that in order to complete the destruction of English trade it was only necessary to prohibit it when it made use of neutral bottoms. So